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Smart Cat Collars: Which Is Best for Health and GPS Tracking?
Fi Mini and Tractive: Which Smart Cat Tracker Should You Buy? For months, I tested Tractive and Fi Mini smart collars on my cat to find the best for activity, sleep, and GPS tracking. Wearable health-monitoring devices, like smart rings, smartwatches, and fitness trackers, help people stay on top of key wellness markers. By providing data on steps, heart rate, sleep, and more, these gadgets allow people to better understand their health, along with the opportunity to improve it with lifestyle shifts. But why should humans have all the fun?
The Oligarchy Is Afraid of Itself Too
Musk v. Altman is a fight over how much power is too much in Silicon Valley. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. In May 2016, Elon Musk did something out of character that he has now spent years of his life trying to undo: He made what he believed to be a charitable donation. The world's richest man is also among its stingiest. Musk's private foundation often doles out less than the minimum percentage required by law.
Five charts that show the rise of global militarisation
What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' The world's militaries spent $2.88 trillion in 2025, an increase of 2.9 percent from the year before, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) latest report. To put that number into perspective, $2.88 trillion amounts to $350 of military spending for each person on the planet. In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera unpacks the rise of global militarisation, including how much each nation spends, which countries sell the most weapons, and how military spending compares with spending on healthcare and education. In 2025, the five biggest military spenders were the United States ($954bn), China ($336bn), Russia ($190bn), Germany ($114bn) and India ($92bn), accounting for more than half (58 percent) of world military spending. The US is by far the biggest spender, as it has been every year since World War II.
Beyond Average Return in Markov Decision Processes
What are the functionals of the reward that can be computed and optimized exactly in Markov Decision Processes? In the finite-horizon, undiscounted setting, Dynamic Programming (DP) can only handle these operations efficiently for certain classes of statistics. We summarize the characterization of these classes for policy evaluation, and give a new answer for the planning problem. Interestingly, we prove that only generalized means can be optimized exactly, even in the more general framework of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL). DistRL permits, however, to evaluate other functionals approximately. We provide error bounds on the resulting estimators, and discuss the potential of this approach as well as its limitations. These results contribute to advancing the theory of Markov Decision Processes by examining overall characteristics of the return, and particularly risk-conscious strategies.
FABind: Fast and Accurate Protein-Ligand Binding
Modeling the interaction between proteins and ligands and accurately predicting their binding structures is a critical yet challenging task in drug discovery. Recent advancements in deep learning have shown promise in addressing this challenge, with sampling-based and regression-based methods emerging as two prominent approaches. However, these methods have notable limitations. Sampling-based methods often suffer from low efficiency due to the need for generating multiple candidate structures for selection. On the other hand, regression-based methods offer fast predictions but may experience decreased accuracy.
When Robots Have Their ChatGPT Moment, Remember These Pincers
From sorting chicken nuggets to screwing in light bulbs, Eka's robots are eerily lifelike. But do they have real physical smarts? It starts gingerly pawing around the table, as if searching for its glasses on the nightstand. It gently positions the bulb between its two pincers. The claw goes chasing it across the table. After a few nips, the bulb is back in its grasp. In more than a decade of writing about robots, I have never seen one move so naturally.
Ethical Considerations for Responsible Data Curation
HCCV datasets constructed through nonconsensual web scraping lack crucial metadata for comprehensive fairness and robustness evaluations. Current remedies are post hoc, lack persuasive justification for adoption, or fail to provide proper contextualization for appropriate application. Our research focuses on proactive, domain-specific recommendations, covering purpose, privacy and consent, and diversity, for curating HCCV evaluation datasets, addressing privacy and bias concerns. We adopt an ante hoc reflective perspective, drawing from current practices, guidelines, dataset withdrawals, and audits, to inform our considerations and recommendations.